There was nothing more to be had from Ricky’s mind. He released his hold on him and left Ricky unharmed, and feeling unthreatened. The last thing he needed was word of their presence in the area sending up red flags that would reach Elsa. “Thanks, Ricky, I think that’ll be all.”
Preston scanned through the security tapes in the restaurant. The cameras were fairly well hidden so as not to be off-putting to the high-end clientele. But they were there. The fool owner had connected his DVR to the internet so he could monitor what was going on inside Salty’s while offsite. Preston had hence hacked his way in via his mindchip and proceeded to lip read the girl from the security tapes. Walking with his partner to the door, Preston said, “They went to the beach afterwards to light a fire and watch the boats on the river, and to spend the night. They were to take a walk along the water’s edge in the morning.”
“I’ll take where they camped out.”
“And I’ll take the waterline they walked,” Preston said.
Outside the restaurant, Preston’s other clone counterpart, call him Z, and call the one walking by his side from inside the restaurant Y, met up with them. “No sign of any possible tread marks associated with that model vehicle dating from 1967 to now in the parking lot,” Z said, “but they’d really have to have been peeling out of here to leave an impression. I’ll check in the direction of the river; I’m sure there’s a spot where the tires would leave an impression.”
“What about the parking lot and city grid cameras in the area?” Preston asked.
“Definitely confirm they were heading towards the river. Caught the plates. Ran them. They’re associated with a crushed vehicle that was recycled. Not registered, obviously.”
“Any luck hacking Elsa’s mind now that we know who she is?” Preston asked.
“No,” Y replied. “She’s gone dark and, my guess, so have the rest of them. Whatever tech they’re using masks the presence of any mindchip or other bioenhancements.”
“Lovely. The beach it is then. Hate getting sand in my socks,” Preston bitched.
“These red Corthay Men’s Arca Patents aren’t going to appreciate getting scuffed on those rocks,” Z echoed.
“You wore twenty-one hundred dollar Saks shoes to chase down a kid who lives in the woods?” Preston said.
“Of course. What did you go with,” Z replied.
“The Salvatore Ferragamo Python Loafer,” Preston said.
Z checked his shoes and made a face. “Good choice.”
“I went with the Berluti Rapieces Reprises,” Y said.
“Nah,” Preston and Z balked. “Too obvious.”
They ran in the direction of the road, overturning the cars driving into the parking lot of Salty’s with their magnetic fields set to repulse metals the same instant it also magnetized them. The cars speeding along the roadway were repulsed in the same manner as the threesome crossed the street. Okay, so maybe low-key wasn’t their specialty, and staying off someone’s radar next to impossible. They’d trade on the fear factor regarding their approach and the impending panic causing their prey to make bad decisions instead.
Eventually they got to some place where they could cut back towards the river, where there was actual beachfront the kids might have been able to camp out for the night.
They left Z to check for tire impressions caused by pulling off the road.
Preston and Y split off.
“Found where they camped,” Y said three minutes fifty-three seconds later.
“Picked up the trail where they walked,” Preston replied.
“Any sloughed skin cells, hair follicles?” Y asked. They were communicating by mindchip, rather than shouting at one another.
“Only the girl’s. The DNA in the boy’s cells has been destroyed,” Preston informed them.
“Catalyzing agent?” Z asked distractedly as he continued to search for tracks.
“Unknown compound. A unique formulation,” Preston replied.
“So he’s begun to weaponize,” Y said. “Wonder if he’s even conscious of the adaptations yet.”
“Doubtful,” Preston said. “There isn’t much point in cloaking yourself if you’re confident you can take on all comers. With the ability to secrete novel substances, he certainly could.”
“Only if those substances were nanite-enhanced,” Z said. “Even with the neuronet, how would his body synthesize its own nanites? Certainly not in quantity.”
Y finished his thought for him, “and if he can’t produce them in quantity, their self-reproductive capacity would have to be off the scale when making contact with any physical substance outside him.”
“Sweat secretions would be the most likely delivery mechanism,” Z said.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, gentlemen.” Preston sucked up the cravat on his tie, continuing to check for footprints in the sand as he walked. “Don’t forget, we’re better at this than he is. Even with the neuronet, he may not have learned to think quite so aggressively or preemptively yet. And even if his unconscious mind has evolved that far, his conscious mind would be needed to initiate an action like that which could trigger a possible ecological disaster.”
“You’re positing a guilty conscious?” Y said.
“Like I said, he’s not us.” Preston was finished discussing the matter. The speculation on what the kid could or couldn’t do struck him as pointless. Speculation wasn’t what the pawns were created for. They were created to fall in battle to surprise attack, thereby exposing enemy strengths and weaknesses.”
“We’re at a dead end,” Y and Z chirped in two-part harmony.
“I don’t think so,” Preston said. “Back to the parking lot.”
Once at the Beamer outside Salty’s, Preston pressed his remote on his keyring and popped the lid of the trunk. Took out the case inside. Unfolded it. Three robot-crabs walked out, responding to his mindchip. They began the work of fabricating the hardware he needed.
“What are you having them build?” Y asked.
“Three miniature jets for us.”
“Cool.” Z nodded approvingly. “Always wanted to fly one of those things. They say they’re like go-carts, only they use air cushions as speedways.”
“We’re going to need more raw materials for feedstock once the 3D printers have exhausted their supplies.” Y played with his ring inobservantly, the stress triggered by the thought of being separated from his new toy for a lack of proper planning.
“Yes,” Preston agreed. “I see some customers coming out of their cars. They should do nicely.”
Z and Y went and grabbed up the nuclear family, husband, wife, and two kids. They zip-tied the parents’ arms and legs and started pulling the kids apart limb by limb to feed the body parts into the fabricators.
The parents screamed and sobbed and writhed in an effort to get free. Well, the kids too. Other families climbing out of their cars promptly got back in and drove off, some slowing their escape to stare hang-jawed at what was going on. “Adam, now is not the time for rubbernecking,” the wife scolded the husband in the car with the windows down. Adam sped up.
Some of the drivers in the other fleeing cars were already dialing 911. By the time anyone got here, Preston and the rest of the unholy trinity would be long gone.
“Wish these things could work faster,” Z said, “I’m kind of excited to play with my new toy.” He took no notice of the father’s vociferous pleading, outcries, and sobs as he dismembered him for the shredder-compactor-feedstock shoot, his eyes not on him but firmly on his prize.
The three miniature fighter jets were complete now. The mother was left on the ground, still alive and intact from the waist up. “Sorry,” Y said to her, “I guess we don’t need you anymore. I was hoping the extra flesh would give me some cool accessories on mine the others don’t have, but it doesn’t seem to work that way.” He tossed back what was left of her one leg.
The woman shrieked at the top of her lungs like some banshee determined to summon the spirits
of hell for backup. But she was bleeding out so fast, she rapidly lost consciousness before anyone in this world, or the next, could come to her aid.
The three agents fired up their metal-grey fighter jets and zoomed off.
***
Elsa was searching for Martha’s hobbit hutch. If Martha was the master of the EMF spectrum, she was the one to talk to about hacking into Roman’s neuronet, now that everyone else had refused. Elsa had been walking around in circles for hours in the area where she’d been told to look, and so far nothing. Maybe the girl was using some electromagnetic frequency bending device to mask her home, like an invisibility cloak.
Elsa finally collapsed at the foot of a tree to catch her breath. Looked up. “Holy shit!”
There was Martha’s hobbit hutch, planted at the top of the tallest tree in the woods, like the damn Space Needle. There was no climbing to it. Forget about that. Not even fresh. There has to be some way of getting up there. It took some more snooping, but Elsa finally figured out the trick. A series of gravity lifts. Trigger the boulder to fall, and up you go. Very primitive. The last time she’d encountered such an elevator, she was a child watching The Flintstones cartoon reruns.
She pulled the stake attached to the first trip wire, like retrieving King Arthur’s sword from a stone. The elevator chamber was concealed under a trap door covered with leaves, below ground, and the wire extending up through the crack along the periphery of the door easy enough to miss, some kind of buckyball strand that could possibly have lifted a space elevator, but damn hard to see.
Up she shot to the first level. There, she got out, saw the dumbbells resting on a tree branch by their grips, of different weights, to offset the weight of the boulder, depending on the weight of the passenger in the elevator. She didn’t need them because evidently she was Martha’s weight, give or take, even if she was a good bit taller.
She’d shot up the tree by way of three more elevator rides before she was at the top of the needle. She crawled through the bottom of Martha’s home through a trap door in the floor. “What the hell are you doing so far up here?” were the first words out of Elsa’s mouth. Probably not the warmest of greetings for someone trying to build rapport.
Martha swiveled on her stool, and upon sight of her guest, yanked the headphones. “I’m testing out communications throughout the stratosphere. Most people don’t realize it, but in an age of space planes, stealth bombers, and nukes you want to go undetected, it’s rather the place to be. I’ve been working on hacking the communications of various countries so that, in the event of war, I can intercede, send fake orders to anyone or anything transiting up there. Mess with their designated targets.”
“Really?”
“Not to mention that the stratosphere is where you’d want to shield us from alien invasions, that kind of thing. Lots of people want to know how to knock planes, rockets, and yes, alien spaceships out of the sky by electrifying the stratosphere.”
“The Tesla towers in Alaska…”
“There you go, if you believe the paranoid conspiracy theories. Trust me, if we’re not doing it, someone else is.” Martha pointed to a chair as if Elsa had finally earned it by saying something intelligent.
Elsa chose to remain standing. “Roman would have your head taken off.”
“What Roman doesn’t know, won’t hurt him. Peace-loving bastard. He means well. I just don’t think he gets how the world works. So what brings you up here?”
“You mean, one bad girl to another?” Elsa smiled.
So did Martha. “You should see my underground home. That’s where I work on messing with submarine communications, and the military frequencies meant to travel through the earth in event of EMP pulses frying communications on the surface, or simply to mobilize their subterranean assets.”
“I’m interested in a different kind of hacking,” Elsa confessed. “Roman has gone and stolen my mind. I don’t have amnesia, he’s holding on to the bulk of who I am, stripped from my neural nets and uploaded to his neural net.”
Martha nodded. “Impressive. Didn’t think the pacifist shit had it in him.”
“Maybe you two can bond later, now that you found something in common. For right now, I need you to get my mind back.”
Martha ran her fingers through her curly red hair as if straightening the curls might trigger a solution to the conundrum. Finally, she said, “Nah, I’ll pass. If he can do that, he can backtrack my signal and fry my mind long before I’ve found the frequency that will allow us to get access to the part of your soul stuck in oblivion.”
“This is our pacifist leader we’re talking about.”
Martha shook her head. “With that neuronet installed? It’s anybody’s guess who he really is these days. And even if he would never do such a thing, it might. It may well have an AI on board with its own agenda. Or it may be working with his unconscious to evolve him in ways his conscious mind can’t accept, and is waiting to spring the information on him when he’s more open to it.”
“Sort of like the way he was waiting to inform me of his theft of my mind, when the time was right. How apropos. Looks like I’ll get my vengeance one way or the other.”
“Sorry, kid,” Martha said, picking up her headphones. “Real sorry for the loss of your mind, not to mention what this does to your relationship. But I kind of have bigger fish to fry right now. Like figuring out how to keep all of us from losing our minds. There could well be floating platforms in the stratosphere with the singular object of beaming depressing thoughts into all our heads so we suddenly don’t feel so rebellious, but instead accept our lot in lives as cattle for the rich.”
“You sound like androgynous Neil with all that paranoid prattle.”
“Baby, these are national governments we’re talking about. There’s no such thing as too paranoid. I admit, using Neil as my personal therapist might be open to question, but the man has inspired much of my work.”
Elsa groaned. “Fine. Time to go to work on Roman, ply my feminine wiles where they’ll do me the most good.”
Martha gave her a thumbs-up. “No one’s invented a secret weapon yet more potent than a pretty face.”
Elsa spotted her wrist bands on Martha’s workbench. Slipped them on. Closed her eyes while she ran a systems check. When she opened her eyes again she could feel a pleasant surge of adrenaline flowing through her. “Hey, they’re working again.”
Martha slipped off the headphones. “Yeah, there was something wrong with the signaling, causing them to misread the feedback from your mindchip. Hatter figured that was more my specialty than his. He was right.”
“I was going to say thanks for nothing, but this isn’t nothing.”
Martha gave her another thumbs-up and slipped back on the headphones, quickly getting lost in her save-the-world-from-itself mission to the exclusion of people standing right beside her.
Elsa descended the tree the same way she came up.
By the time she was on the ground she’d come up with her master plan for unlocking Roman’s mind enough to get access to her own mind.
***
“Where did you lose sight of the pickup truck?” Preston asked Z. They were talking once again via their mindchips. The thruster sounds the miniature jetfighters made, not entirely masked despite the sound dampeners in the cockpits, would have precluded conversing by speakerphone.
“At the foot of that mountain, just where the city grid ends. There’s an area damn near half the size of the state where the grid doesn’t extend.”
Preston nodded. “Smart. They probably make use of random parking for their anonymous vehicles, and just foot it in beyond that point. We’ll scan the trails leading from where we lost the truck for foot traffic,” Preston said. “Ignore any trails too heavily traversed; that wouldn’t be them. Check the foot trails with the least traffic. Look for footprints that diverge initially along different paths but that ultimately converge later. They would know to cover their tracks by never following the same routes
in and out.”
The three jets split off and dove down. They were able to fly on their sides to squeeze through the trees hemming in the narrower trails. The agents’ bionic eyes did the scanning of the trails’ foot traffic and their mindchips processed the information at superhuman speeds.
It was fifteen minutes, thirty-seven seconds later when, by comingling their data, the mandala-like pattern was identified. At the center of the mandala was the commune, presumably. An area covering about forty acres. “We’ll need more agents on the ground,” Z said.
“Summoned them before we split off,” Preston advised. “They’re parachuting to the target area now that they’ve received the final coordinates. We’ll have the commune surrounded. No one is getting out of there we don’t want escaping.”
***
Roman lived in a yurt. A high-end one. One of those kit homes you sent away for and by the time it was fully appointed, probably cost about sixty-grand. The interior was beautiful and screamed upper middle class home. Just like the one he no doubt grew up in. Albeit the whole tract-home idea had been translated into hippy-appropriate-commune-style living.
The yurt perched on a deck giving enough ground clearance to situate plumbing, electrical underneath. The electrical feed lines led to solar panels as well as a generator. The plumbing routed to a river for incoming water. Outgoing sewage was sent to a septic tank.
She tried to keep from gagging from the bourgeois stench as she stepped inside. It would have been rude. Wherever she came from, it wasn’t as nice as this.
The light inside was warm, made amber by both the old-fashioned incandescent bulbs and the creams and beiges of the canvas walls of the yurt and neutral tones of the decorated interior.
Roman lay atop his queen-size post bed, fiddling absently with a Rubik’s cube, which he showed no sign of solving soon. It was her guess his mind was on her.
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 18